Saussure’s Notes of 1881–1885 on Inner Speech, Linguistic Signs and Language Change

This article analyses previously unpublished notes by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contained in a single large register which he used in the first half of the 1880s. The earliest pages include his detailed reactions to La parole intérieure (1881) by Victor Egger (1848–1909). Although these reactions are sometimes hostile, the later notes, dated December 1884 and March 1885, appear to build on ideas he encountered in Egger. These notes — probably connected to his course on Gothic and Old High German grammar at the École des Hautes Études in Paris — show to what extent the account of language associated with his lectures on general linguistics of 1907–1911 was already present in his teaching a quarter of a century earlier.